Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The End of Puzzlement?

The juggling act in which William Dembski has to engage in order to maintain popular appeal amongst a broad church ID/YEC movement may be evidenced in his UD post advertising his latest book “The End of Christianity”. I’ve always been rather puzzled by his position and the following quote taken from the UD post only compounds my puzzles: “Even though argument in this book is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution.”

Dembski gives every impression of being a very nice guy, but over in America this evolution/ID debate sometimes resembles a kind of football culture with star players getting money and accolades, and supporters fanatically sold out to their respective sides. I’m unsure about whether or not Dembski’s position is compromised by having an adoring “fan club” and, who knows, wealthy benefactors as well. Is fan club driven science a good atmosphere for a dispassionate perspective on the cosmos, a perspective that is far healthier when one is prepared to face one’s demons rather than one's fans? Will I buy the book? I’ll have to think about it.

3 comments:

Interesting that every single person I spoke with at Hillsong was anti-evolution, each refusing to entertain the idea for a second. I would be interested to see the results of a worldwide poll, showing the percentage of Christians that were for and against evolution. Then again, leave in only those who know a deal about the subject and evolution/common ancestry would, I think, be very high indeed.

Thanks for the comment James.It would also be interesting to devise a poll, if such were possible, to measure Christian’s emotional commitment to an anti-evolution outlook and also their estimation of its importance in Christian belief.

It is an irony I am always remarking on, but it seems to me that the spectre of deism is a bogey that looms large in the concept set of many a Christian. Deism is not that far removed from atheism in that it imputes a self existing sufficiency to the laws of science, and these laws in turn, deity like, are regarded as the vital dynamic that maintains and orders the cosmos. It is then a short and easy step to do away with the conventional God. Atheists & deists have high view of the laws of science, as do, ironically, many a Christian who quake at the thought of a self sufficient material ontology sustained by laws, laws that effectively compete with God himself. Hence to reassure themselves in the face of a sustaining role plausibly assigned to physical law, many Christians are forced to place a premium on the conception of an interventional God, a God who, they suggest, contrives radical breaks with normalcy thus proving His divine mettle and potency in the face of an apparently competing material ontology.

In this context one’s view of evolution is a shibboleth readily used by many atheists and Christians in order to bully the unwary into their way of thinking. So perhaps your experience at Hillsong should be put in this context. You can perhaps see why I have been feeling rather alienated from sections of evangelicalism for many a year.

My own view of the “laws of science” is not nearly as high as either atheists, deists or Christian fear makes it. I regard those “laws” as descriptive heuristics that have no existence conferring vitality about them. The laws of science are computational devices that inform as to the apparent regularities in the ontology around us - and that perhaps only for a season. Imputing an existential vitalism to the laws of physics is a category mistake in my opinion, a category mistake often made by both atheists and Christians. As you and I know one needs to look elsewhere for the existential vitalism!

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.